The fictionalized Chelsea occupies that irritating middle ground where she's not likable enough to be watchable when she's just existing, and yet neutered enough that her bad behavior isn't actually all that funny.

With the show so half-hearted about its subject matter, Teenage Daughter has to lean on the hackiest of punchlines.

It could be a problem Allen Gregory solves later on, either by softening its main character (and his dad) or by pushing supporting characters more to the forefront, but the version on display in the pilot is one I have no interest in ever watching again.

But because Lohan seems to be going to a costume party dressed as Taylor while Bowler's giving a performance, the whole thing is an imbalanced mess.

By the third episode, though, we've gone off the rails with another low-level blackmailer somehow getting over on an employee at the supposedly powerful and secretive CTU, and with Jack getting caught up in a plot-delaying detour that's even dumber than the survivalist who held Kim hostage for a few episodes in season two.

Who wants to watch a less funny, vaguely cuddlier House impersonator?

It at times seems like a pornographic parody of "The X-Files."

A lame new sitcom.

Having two nearly identical, equally mediocre sitcoms on the air at the same time isn't exactly a crime, but it seems an awful waste of someone's time and energy.

What the obnoxious "Cashmere Mafia" and now the dull Lipstick Jungle suggest is that it's not as easy to recreate the "Sex and the City" phenomenon as assembling three or four attractive actresses of a certain age and pairing them with a name producer from the HBO show.

The hallucinatory gimmick can only do so much for the same old stories.

"Runaway" is like a Frankenstein's monster stitched together from pieces of dead shows from both networks.

Basically, [the lead character is] a collection of every stereotypical romantic comedy and chick-lit trait, made especially annoying by Heche.

A gimmick in search of a show.

It abandons all of Kelley's strengths, like the legal setting and male bonding, and drowns itself in his weaknesses: women discussing their feelings, women flirting with men, women acting body-conscious... basically, anything involving the female gender.

The show inspires nothing but my apathy.

It's a very special, frustrating kind of bad, one with the power to actually change history.

All the gunplay, pedal-to-the-metal action and cartoon villains cheapen any serious talk of what's going on in the city.

Regardless of how promiscuous its obnoxious hero is, Californication remains a smug, unpleasant ego trip to nowhere.

Journeyman doesn't do anything especially interesting with its time-twisting premise. It's competently produced, but unless you have a tremendous amount of affection for McKidd left over from his work as the insane Lucius Vorenus on HBO's "Rome," it's skippable.

Jamie is our heroine, the one we're supposed to like and care about, but as played by British actress Ryan ("EastEnders," "Jekyll"), she's a mopey blank, badly upstaged every time Sackhoff makes one of her all-too-brief appearances as Corvus.

It is every organ transplant storyline you've ever seen before on "ER" or "Chicago Hope" or elsewhere, told in the most unimaginative fashion possible, acted out by a competent group of actors not given much to play.

They've assembled a cast suffering a major charisma deficit and given them wooden, cliche-riddled dialogue to deliver.

Despite its silly trappings, Farmer Wants a Wife is neither appalling nor unintentionally funny enough to merit sitting through yet another contrived dating show where the biggest prize would be for someone, anyone, to escape with a bit of their dignity intact.

It's not just familiar, but lazy.

Kath & Kim writers, meanwhile, seem to have nothing but contempt for their heroines. Kim is willfully ignorant, rude and obnoxious in a fashion that has no redeeming qualities, and Kath is mainly an unhappy blank who lets her daughter walk all over her.

If you've watched ABC at all this summer, you've essentially seen all Wipeout has to offer: people of various shapes, sizes and ages all falling face-first into the mud while trying to complete an obstacle course that's been designed to be all but impossible to finish unscathed.

There isn't a series here; just the pitch meeting for a very expensive, very loud, very dopey action movie.